Book Review

Wrestling with an unseen God

The Man Who Went Into the West: the life of R.S. Thomas

S. Thomas - Ronald to hardly anyone - lived latterly in westerly Wales, in a cold damp cottage, from which the radiators had been stripped because his wife, a painter, hadn't liked the look of them. In January 1987, in the kitchen with the fire alight, it was 1.8 degrees Centigrade. They had no television and took no paper. One day a vacuum cleaner arrived. "H'm, makes a lot of noise, doesn't it?" he remarked, and it was never used again.
R.S. Thomas was a priest of the Church in Wales and one of the great poets of the twentieth century. In his poem Via Negativa, he speaks of God as

... that great absence
In our lives, the empty silence
Within ...

[who]

... keeps the interstices
In our knowledge, the darkness
Between stars.

His poems do not see in nature the glory of this Deus absconditus, for all that they catch the look and sound of sea and stone, raptor and wren. In church at best Thomas glimpsed his shadow wrestling with the unseen God. He preached every week, but published no sermon. At the end of his long life (1913-2000), he declared that he wrote of God because he believed in God, "a poet who sang creation".
A stunning start to Byron Rogers' book is a long tirade from Thomas' son Gwydion. He clearly hated his father, from the time the boy was sent away at eight to boarding school. He hated his disapproval of his girlfriends, his solitariness, his not teaching him Welsh, for everything, almost, except for "being very good at what he attempted to be". Thomas was "a man incapable of love, and full of love, so with him it came roaring out".
So Rogers, a Welshman, lyrical writer and biographer, now in his sixties, has fallen
among interesting material. He had met Thomas when he was 17, and fearlessly read him his poems. In this biography he relishes black humour. Thomas' grandson remarked to him one day, "You know, if you wanted to, you could make this a real tale of giggles."
He does not quite do that, thank God, but he tells us of the many oddities of this upper-class-accented English speaker who loved Welshness more than the Welsh, taught himself the language, praised the courage of the cottage-burning Nationalists, but chose to
write his poetry in English.
Gwydion calls him "a very idle priest", but every day from 5 to 8 p.m. he visited the sick, and that mounts up. Rogers gathers thankful memories of Thomas as counsellor, Good Samaritan and good company. He started a youth club in one parish and taught them to play musical chairs, but since they had no music, the signal would come when he winked. This is amusing, but Rogers then ima-
gines the scene as an H.M. Bateman cartoon, and there is a certain arch nudging about this. Still, one suspects that reactions to Thomas depended on the acuteness of the observer. Gwydion remembers a week before he married, his father telling him he was making a big mistake. "I said it was a fine time to be telling me. He said: 'I thought you knew.' "
Silence and refusal to explain characterised Thomas' life, but not the 1,500 poems that survived the waste-paper basket beside which he wrote (his wife ironing some save-
lings). If his son hated him, Thomas, we learn, hated his own mother, and his father, a seafarer, grew to be profoundly deaf.
It was his mother's idea that the boy loner should seek ordination, and he was later to say of his clerical profession, "It has given me time, which is the most necessary of all to a poet." He began at a parish straggling the
border, and moved ever westward. His hatreds moved with him. In a poem of the 1940s, A Priest to His People, he writes:

Men of the hills, wantoners, men of Wales,
With your sheep and your pigs and your ponies, your sweaty females,
How I have hated you for your irreverence.

At one church he removed the brass
memorials from the walls and painted pews and pulpit matt black. At Eglwys Fach he
discovered "the smell of the farmyard was replaced by the smell of the decayed conscience". He never found true Wales at the foot of the
rainbow, no matter how far he moved west. He denounced machinery, but bird-watching filled days that most spend in chit-chat with other souls.
Byron Rogers records what many voices say of R.S. Thomas. The result is as readable and rounded a life of the man as could be written. As for the poetry, it speaks for itself.

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